Quantitative Analysis of Synergetic Properties in Chinese Nouns

Abstract

This paper analyses more than 13000 nouns in contemporary Chinese and investigates their synergetic properties on the basis of word polysemy. HowNet is used in this paper to measure the word polysemy and it proves to be an effective approach. Statistical analysis of the data indicates that the polysemy of nouns abides by the modified Zipf-Alekseev distribution. The results of function fitting with Altmann Fitter show that word polysemy is somewhat related to some linguistic variables including word length, word frequency and polytexuality, which means that each variables in the subsystem of lexicon is still synergetic and Köhler’s lexical model proves to be effective for Chinese nouns.